Titus Awakes : The Lost Book of Gormenghast

The final novel of the acclaimed fantasy series continues the adventures of Titus, Earl of Groan, completed by the author’s widow based on his fragments. Mervyn Peake’s series of novels featuring the inhabitants of Gormenghast castle are “a work of extraordinary imagination.” After Titus Groan , Gormenghast , and Titus Alone , Peake was working on a fourth chapter in the series before his death. Maeve Gilmore, Mervyn Peake's widow, wrote Titus Awakes based on those pages left behind by Peake ( The New Yorker ). Titus Awakes picks up the story of Titus, 77th Earl of Groan, as he wanders through the modern world. Fans of the Gormenghast novels will relish this continuation of the world Peake created and of the lives of unforgettable characters from the original novels, including the scheming Steerpike, Titus's sister Fuchsia, and the long-serving Dr. Prunesquallor. Published a century after Peake's birth, this strikingly original novel provides a moving coda to Peake's masterwork. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, 'a classic of our age.' In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream--lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson's disease took Peake's life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed. In January of 2010, Peake's granddaughter found four composition books in her attic. They contained the fabled Titus Awakes in its entirety. Peake had outlined the novel for his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who had at last finished Peake's masterpiece. It starts with Titus leaving Castle Gormenghast. Peake wrote: 'With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home. That night, as Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him. ' Fans of Peake will delight in this new, wonderful novel, published one hundred years after his birth, every bit as thrilling and masterfully written as his famed trilogy The fourth and final volume of the classic Gormenghast novels, produced from recently discovered manuscripts written by Peake's wife and based on his outlines, follows Titus's nightmarish departure from Castle Gormenghast